Alter, Robert Edmond - Carny Kill

185 Pages·2016·0.54 MB·English

by  Alter Robert Edmund

CARNY KILL
by Robert Edmond Alter

Copyright 1966 by Robert Edmond Alter

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random
House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Fawcett
Publications, Inc. in 1966.

First Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Edition, March 1993

ISBN 0-679-74443-6

To Pat Stadley
1

It was one of those tourist traps that have turned the coast of Florida into a
glittering facade. They hide the naked sight of the hundreds of thousands of
voracious cash registers behind the tinsel. That way the innocent tourists won’t
be stampeded into running for cover in fear for their wallets.
This place was on the outskirts, on the tidelands, where acreage is cheap. It
was a big, bristling, brawling take-off on the Disneyland idea out in Southern
Cal. You might almost call it a steal.
It was owned and operated by an old carny man named Robert Cochrane, and
he was a pretty canny Irishman. If Disney had a Jungle Ride, Cochrane had a
Swamp Ride. The Swiss Family Robinson Tree House at Disneyland became the
Tarzan House at Neverland. That was the name of the trap. Neverland.
Remember Peter Pan’s fun-andgames island?
Like most of those places that are designed for the tourist who wanders
around with money falling out of his pockets, it looked fine on top, impressive.
Then you start scratching the surface and the dirt you find under your fingernails
is the same grime you’ll find in any clipjoint.
That’s why I felt at home.
They had a regular old fashioned carnival attraction tucked behind a
monstrosity called Dracula’s Castle— where all kinds of wired spooks sprang at
you with earsplitting screams and where your girl’s skirt was blown up around
her ears so all the sailors and pimply-faced highschool dropouts could gawk at
her panties. I made for it like a homing pigeon.
But something was wrong. It was like I’d walked into a familiar room and
found that somebody had moved a couple pieces of furniture out of place.
They had the illusion show and the shooting gallery and the fat lady and the
tattooed man and the stripshow. Everything was there but it was out of tune. The
stripshow barker for example. He was as noisy and as flashy as he should be but
he wasn’t trying to turn his tip with that air of insistent urgency you usually
expect to find in a sideshow. He seemed to be making a joke of it.
Then I got it. It was all a joke, a part of the facade. The carny attraction was
only there for atmosphere. So Ma could turn to Pa and say, “Why it’s just like a
regular sideshow, ain’t it, Elmo?” Just good wholesome fun. Something else
Cochrane had learned from Mr. Disney.
A soldier and two girls and a man and wife with their two girls, and then two
girls who didn’t seem to belong to anybody, were all ganged around the shooting
gallery and the soldier was making an embarrassed sap of himself by missing all
the little white rabbits as they glided by on their pivots.
One of the soldier’s girls turned and looked at me—that sort of under-and-
around look that’s been handed down from girl to girl for God knows how many
thousands of years—and she had on a sweater that must have belonged to her
little sister, it was that tight, and she might have been all of sixteen.
I decided to make the soldier look even better.
“Step aside, folks,” I said in my barker voice. “Let the man see the rabbit’
The op behind the counter had the kind of mute, predatory face that belonged
in a shooting gallery. He gave me a quick flat look and handed me a twentytwo
in exchange for my quarter.
The soldier didn’t think much of me. He said so with his eyes. I grinned at
him. Then I winked at the girl on his left. The one with the sweater that wouldn’t
stop.
I looked at the twentytwo and it looked all right. Then I bapped at the first
little rabbit and turned him aboutf ace on his pivot. It seemed to be an honest
rifle. When the rabbit slid out of his burrow again I went to work on him and
kept him turning right-left, right-left until the magazine was empty.
I handed the rifle back to the op.
“Where do I find The Man?” I asked.
His eyes drifted to the left as though he were thinking about something else—
anything, including reaching for the billy he probably kept under the counter.
“Something wrong?” he asked quietly.
“No beef,” I told him. “Need a job.”
“Carny?”
“Yeah.” I named a couple of outfits.
“Spiel?”
“Um. And sleight of hand. The usual.”
His eyes flicked at me again. Then he raised himself against the counter and
called over our heads to a girl who was passing through the outer crowd.
“Billie! ‘Mere, huh?”
This girl wasn’t sixteen. She wasn’t wearing a sweater. She looked as sharp as
a New York City model. She had floss candy hair that made you hungry. She
stopped and looked toward us inquiringly, then walked our way, her highheels
clicking rhythmically on the cement.
That’s when the soldier decided to show his girls just who was as tough as a
horseshoe around there.
“You wink at her, buddy?” He meant the sweater girl.
“No,” I said.
He came a little closer and managed to give the movement a touch of swagger.
“Yeah but I seen you,” he said.
“Then why ask me about it—if you sawed me?”
“Listen, buddy,” he said.
I didn’t want to fight him. There was no point in it. I was pretty sure I could
take him, the way a fighter can sometimes tell with his opponent the first
moment he comes in against him. There’s no profit in proving something to
yourself that you already know.
I said, “Let’s forget about it,” and I turned to face the girl with the cottoncandy
hair.
She was looking at my face and her eyes slid over my right shoulder and
widened a little. I guess the soldier had decided to exhibit some muscle about
then, because I heard the shooting gallery op say, “Ixnay, soldier. Or I’ll have
three guards on you before you can say Jesus.”
The soldier said something about my mother’s marital status and gathered up
his girls and left. I wasn’t paying any attention. I was looking at the girl called
Billie.
You meet a girl like this, who looked as if she had just stepped out of the
center-spread of Playboy magazine with her clothes on, and you can damn near
feel your lousy fiftytwo-dollar suit grow wrinkles and you wish to God you had
shaved later in the day instead of the first thing in the morning.
“He wants to see Rob. A job. Take him, huh?” The shooting gallery op
finished his telegram message and this Billie looked at me again and said,
“Sure.”
I said thanks to the shooting gallery op and Billie and I walked off together.
One of the things I liked about her is that she didn’t use that wouldn’t-you-
like-to-lay-me look that’s been handed down for thousands of years. When she
looked at me it was straight on. It wasn’t cold or to hell with you, buster. It was
impersonal and it was honest.
“Billie,” I said. “That’s a perfect name for a prostitute.”
“What’s that crack supposed to mean?” A little fire came into her eyes. They
were gold-flecked. It was still daylight. That’s how I could tell the color of her
eyes.
“No inference meant,” I said. “That’s just the way your name struck me. If I
were going to write a book and I wanted a whore in it, I’d call her Billie.”
She smiled. “Too stereotyped. Too obvious. I’d fool everyone and call her an
old-fashioned name. Like Emily.”
I didn’t tell her I’d once known a whore named Emily. She hadn’t been old-
fashioned though.
The barker on the illusion show bally platform was an adenoidal-looking man
who used his adenoma-voice as part of his stock in trade. He was spieling to a
group of marks about the spider lady.
“She scrabbles, she climbs, she spins a web.”
Then I looked at him again. He was looking over his marks at me. I didn’t say
anything or make a sign. I kept on walking with Billie. But she had noticed.
“Something?” she asked incuriously.
“Uh-uh.” There was no sense in telling her that Bill Duff and I once worked in
a carny together. That Bill Duff used to hang around my wife like a bee around
honey. That Bill Duff lost an eyetooth one night when I lost my patience.
“What do you do around here, Billie?” I asked.
“I’m one of the nautch girls. I do a specialty dance. Only it’s more the Twist
than anything Far East.”
“I’ll bet you’re good.”
She smiled up at me. I’m fairly tall. So was she but even in her spike heels I
was up to her.
“I’ll bet you bet,” she said.
“I’ll come see you in action sometime,” I said.
“Not if Rob gives you a job you won’t.” She was firm about that.

They had a tavern which really wasn’t a tavern and they called it the
Klondike. It was right out of the 1898 gold rush. Lots of Yukon atmosphere.
They had a floorshow where the girls in the big feathered hats whirled around
and threw up their skirts and saluted the audience with their bottoms. A sort of
halfassed cancan. They served only soft drinks. It was pretty cute.
Billie took me around to the back. There was a closed door with the usual
mysterious word Private on it, and she said: “You’ll find Rob upstairs.”
“All right,” I said. “Now I know where to find Rob. Where do I find you?”
“I told you where I work.”
“You said I was too young to see such sights.”
She smiled and it was a very pretty thing and I wanted to reach out and take
hold of her and start making love to her right there in front of the private door
behind the Klondike.
“I’ll know where to find you,” she said. “If you get the job. The word gets
around.” Then she said, “Oh. You didn’t mention your name.”
“I never do if I can help it. So I go by the first half of my last. Thax.”
“Thaxton?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m Billie Peeler.”
I looked at her. It was too much of a coincidence to be true. She laughed.
“My agent gave it to me. Only took him an hour of brainracking to come up
with it.”
“I figured.”
“Well,” she said, “I hope you get the job.”
“Well,” I said, “it doesn’t really matter, does it?”
Her greengold eyes gave me a look of mild speculation. “That’s entirely up to
you—Thax!’
I wasn’t sure I got that. Then I looked at her eyes again and I was sure. And it
did matter whether I got that job or not.
2

This Robert Cochrane reminded me of a character out of The Informer. As
Irish as Paddy’s potato. Built like one, too. Big, round, rough. He didn’t have the
faith-andbejasus brogue though, which was a shame. Then he would have been
complete. He must have been getting on to sixty.
“C’mon in and grab a seat. That one—where I can look at you. Carny man,
huh?” He grinned at me like a Halloween pumpkin.
“The word really does get around,” I said, and sat in a chair on the other side
of his desk. “Or does it show on my face?”
“Gabby gave me a buzz,” he explained. “I like to keep in touch.”
“Gabby,” I said. “Oh, the shooting gallery op.” It was one of those ironic
reversals. The guy who hardly ever opens his mouth is usually tagged Gabby.
“Spielers I don’t need,” Cochrane told me right off. “They’re a dime a dozen.”
“So are strippers,” I said. “But who ever turns a pro down?”
The light went on in his pumpkin face again.
“You’re good, huh? What have you done?”
I named a few outfits I had worked for. Then I said, “My wife used to have an
act. I spieled for her.”
He was studying me now.
“What’s your name?”
“L. M. Thaxton. Thax is good enough.”
His grin came back. “I’ll bet that first initial covers up a doozy.”
I smiled. “How would you like to be called Leslie?”
“What about this sleight of hand?” he wondered. “You good at it?”
I hunched forward and put both my elbows on the desk, picked up a number
four pyramid-shaped sinker he used as a paperweight in my left hand and held it
up to him. Then I made a flicker of motion with my right forefinger and the split
instant his eyes trembled I ducked my left hand at the wrist and showed him my
open palm and he was staring at an empty hand.
A real legerdemain artist is born, not made. Constant practice is vital, sure.
But it doesn’t add up to a good goddam if the sense of prestidigitation isn’t
inherent in the performer. The big trick is in directing the attention of your
audience at the instant you substitute one thing for another. I had directed
Cochrane’s attention to my right hand when I shot the sinker down my left
sleeve.
Cochrane was beaming like a kid. Funny thing about him—as old as he was
and as long as he’d been around illusionists, he still got a kick out of that sort of
thing.
“It’s up your left sleeve, huh?” he said.
“Sure—it was,” I said and I shot my left arm straight out at him and turned
over my fist and opened it and it was still empty. He smiled and looked in my
right hand and took back his paperweight.
“You’ve got the knack,” he admitted, “but …” He thought about it for a bit.
Then— “Here’s a thought. You good at the shell game?”
I said I was and he said all right, he would put me in the carnival attraction
with a stand and the shell game, to add to the atmosphere. Then he became
serious.
“This ain’t the old carny you and I knew,” he warned me. “We don’t pick the
marks up by the heels and shake ‘em till they’re dry anymore. Times have
changed.”
“Yes they have,” I said. “The shooting gallery op still keeps a sap under the
counter and you still pay the law blind money to ignore the nautch girls.”